1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to the field of computer software. More specifically, the invention relates to object-oriented programming structures.
2. Background
When two or more information devices such as computing machines or audio/video (A/V) equipment are connected together in a network environment, the method and means of communication amongst them should be robust and tailored to fit the application being performed. One such method and means known as COM (Component Object Model) developed by Microsoft Corporation, provides for a highly developed system of "objects" transacted among software components executing within a single device such as a personal computer. Since COM does not adequately support the passing of such objects among components executing on separate devices, an extension of COM known as DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) was also developed. One operating system platform that adopts and transacts objects according to DCOM is the Windows NT.TM. operating system (a trademark of Microsoft Corporation).
While useful for many computing applications deriving from or desiring the use of a network, DCOM is inadequate for certain other applications. One class of applications for which DCOM is inadequate and prohibitive, are real-time applications. Real-time applications suffer greatly under the effect of high latency due to the tremendous overhead involved in DCOM. For instance, DCOM, at every instantiation of a new object requires that a class factory first be instantiated and that then the object be manufactured.
Further, under DCOM, the creation of every object involves a search through the windows operating system "registry" which tracks objects for all the various applications and services running under the operating system. While DCOM is highly extensible making for easy creation of new objects dynamically, by linking, for example, to a Dynamic Linked Library, this introduces more overhead and latency. In a real-time system where the system components and their objects are fairly well-known and defined, there is no motivation for such extensibility.
A further problem with DCOM technology and other such operating system specific object-oriented technology is one of non-portability. A non-Windows NT.TM. or Windows 95 computer system cannot run applications that utilize DCOM. Thus, applications written with object-oriented methods of DCOM cannot be ported to other platforms without great difficulty.
What is needed is a simpler, more efficient and lower latency distributed object technology that enables multiple devices on a network to interact. Further, it would be desirable for such a technology to be easily ported from one platform to the next, such that utilizing applications can also be readily ported.